Friday, March 19, 2010

Streaming Videos on the iPhone

I was monkeying around with my iPhone today and I realised that the iPhone supports HTML5 video streaming. However, the catch is that it must be encoded using H.264. I've tried a website that was streaming a MP4 H.264 encoded video and it works perfectly.

If you're interested and you're on the iPhone, goto this website here and scroll to the end of the page. You should be able to see a video. Tap on it and it will automatically launch the Quicktime player in the iPhone. Just tap on the play button and the video will start. When you tap on the Done button, it will bring you back to the webpage.

Soon, we'll be able to see video streaming on the Internet without being held hostage by Flash or Silverlight. Many of the browsers can support this capability out of the box even now. Now my hope is that the other websites will start to use this technology. I wonder if Facebook will embed this technology into the Facebook app. It will resolve the video streaming problem that the app currently has.